Populism: Seeking to reclaim U.S. from elites
Special to The Washington Post
If one were to try to pinpoint the birthplace of populism, eastern Kansas — home to the honest-to-God geographical center of the U.S.A. — would be a solid bet, historically and metaphorically.
During the drought-ridden years of the 1880s and 1890s, movements such as the Farmer’s Alliance flourished there, promoting a vision of government that supported the interests of America’s farmers over those of bankers, corporations and railroads. In the city of Winfield, the radical American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator newspaper was the first to use the term “populist” in print, referring to the new People’s Party formed in 1891 to push collective bargaining, a graduated income tax and other peoplecentered policies. The Nonconformist was firmly in the populists’ corner, but 150 miles to the north, Kansas’ leading Republican newspaper derided the reformers as a gang of disgruntled hayseeds.
Nearly 130 years later, in the decade of Trump, Brexit and Bolsonaro, both of these views are alive and well. And as always, the populist label remains easier to apply than to define.
“From the very beginning ... populism had two meanings,” Thomas Frank instructs in his brilliantly written, eye-opening “The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.” “There was Populism as its proponents understood it, meaning a movement in which ordinary citizens demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless
resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable.”
Mr. Frank — a former Harper’s columnist, founding editor of the Baffler and bestselling author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” — is the ideal public intellectual to grapple with this duality. From 1891 to the rise of Trumpism, Mr. Frank walks readers through a minefield of assumptions about populism’s nature and history. His reflections on the 1896 presidential election set the narrative’s pace and tone, describing the new alliance between populists and Democrats that delivered the latter party’s nomination to William Jennings Bryan, and the competing alliance of big business and Republicans that ultimately propelled William McKinley to victory and precipitated the populists’ decline.
Stressing populism’s egalitarian roots in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Mr. Frank rails against modern Democratic and GOP elites for a disdainful attitude toward ordinary, hard-working people — an attitude he considers as “poisonous today as it was in the Victorian Era, or in the Great Depression.” Mr. Frank calls out TV talking heads for stripping the populist label from Martin Luther King Jr. and the AFL-CIO, and instead linking it only to the xenophobia, racism and Twitter rants of the current president.
Mr. Frank devotes the middle chapters of “The People, No” to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which fused populism with a smart liberalism. Though it helped millions survive the Great Depression, it also earned endless opposition from Republicans, their Wall Street backers and most of America’s big-city newspapers.
For Mr. Frank, the lineage is clear between the People’s Party of the 1890s and Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism. Roosevelt succeeded, Mr. Frank insists, because he rejected his generation’s accepted wise men of finance and industry and instead sought counsel from progressives like Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins — genuine reformers who recognized that the historic moment called not for doubling down on the system but for devising new solutions to meet grave new challenges.
“Painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt’s willingness to disregard elites that won that war,” Mr. Frank concludes. “These were the reasons the New Deal succeeded and democracy lived. If the heroes of those days were cranks, then thank God for cranks. Thank God for populism.” Given our current historical moment, that’s a lesson Joe Biden would do well to heed.
A broad lense
Throughout “The People, No,” Mr. Frank takes pains to look at populism through a broad lens — from Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, Fred Harris and Frank Capra to Father Charles Coughlin, Pat Buchanan and Steve Bannon. His reflection on how the jeansclad Jimmy Carter wrapped himself in populism to avoid being tagged as a socialist, liberal or conservative is spot-on. In Mr. Frank’s view, Mr. Carter was “a bland technocrat” who donned populism to win the White House but then chose as his Fed chairman Paul Volcker, who famously said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline” and raised interest rates to 20% to make it happen.
Frank also accuses Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and “blue-collar billionaire” Donald Trump of being faux populists in bed with Wall Street and the ruling class. Mr. Obama earns scorn from Mr. Frank for leaning on tropes of populists as anti-science zealots clinging to guns and religion, and for his 2016 charge that an unnamed candidate had“embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore.” Hillary Clinton is chastised for stereotyping half of Mr. Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” and “irredeemables.”
By the close of “The People, No,” readers know where Mr. Frank stands. He bristles over an elite that dreads “the lower orders” and uses its power and wealth to squash peace movements, labor strikes and demands for universal health care. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the type of politicians Mr. Frank thinks we need more of.
“For whom does America exist?” he asks in closing. “Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring awesome new animation technology? Or is it the other way around — are they supposed to serve us?”
Frank wants readers to ponder this fundamental question and come away knowing that at its heart, populism means just one thing: This land was made for you and me.